http://www.nationalreview.com/node/423902/print Before Welcoming Thousands of Syrian Refugees, We Should Consider What Somali Immigrants Have Brought the U.S.
By Ian Tuttle — September 11, 2015
With apologies to Golden Gopher fans, Minneapolis, Minn., is probably not most people’s idea of a destination city. Unless, that is, the traveler in question is Somali, in which case Minneapolis is the closest thing this side of the Atlantic to home.
Thanks to American refugee-resettlement and family-reunification policies, Minneapolis has the dubious distinction of hosting the largest concentration of Somalis in the United States — some 30,000, according to census records, though Somali leaders say that underestimates the population by tens of thousands. The influx began in the 1980s, as Somalia succumbed to internal violence, and continued through the ’90s, as it was consumed by civil war. A quarter-century later, Somalia remains among the least stable countries on Earth, and Somalis continue to come to the United States in droves. Before the Obama administration welcomes 10,000 (or more) Syrian refugees, it should consider the Somalis.
Between 1983 and 2004, the United States resettled just over 55,000 Somali refugees, 13,000 of them in 2004 alone. After a dip in the mid-2000s, Somali refugee resettlement picked back up: 27,000 Somalis entered the U.S. from 2008 to 2013, making the country the fourth-largest source of refugees in that period, behind only Burma, Iraq, and Bhutan.
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